Art and Identity in a Time of Transition

Like the early medieval European metalwork in the Art Museum's Portable Art of the Migration Era case (see images below), these cast metal ornaments reveal both cultural continuity and change in a time of global interaction. Made by Djenné and Dogon artists, they span some of the greatest imperial periods of medieval and early modern Mali, a trade crossroads through which portable goods carried symbols of personal identity across vast distances. Blacksmiths made these works using copper that was probably obtained through trans-Saharan trade routes.

A network of itinerant blacksmiths may have operated in the Dogon and Djenné regions, resulting in stylistic similarities between works from these neighboring areas; the pendant of a kneeling figure could have come from either region. The two horses (ring and sculpture in the center, above) speak to the symbolism of imported horses, a rare prestige good from North Africa: as links to mythical founding figures or as powerful evocations of the horses and cavalry central to the story of Sundiata Keita (d. 1255), founder of the Malian Empire of the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. While the exact use of the bracelet is unknown, its geometric pattern likely had social or spiritual significance.